Peter Weir is an Australian director credited in part with revitalizing the Australian film industry through the Australian New Wave Cinema movement, a state- and government-funded effort to reinvigorate Australian film production after a near total stand-still following World War II. The film journal Senses of Cinema describes Weir's film style as one where "generic conventions border on the iconoclastic, alternative realities and cultural incompatibilities abound, and numinous yearnings challenge staid conventionalities." This description is consistent with the story and themes of Dead Poets Society, in which iconoclasm is at the forefront of the film's central conflict, the formation of a group in which students think and create on their own and for themselves. To be sure, the film also showcases cultural incompatibilities when Keating's unique teaching methods clash with the Welton administration's straight-nosed ideologies. And of course, the central conflict of the film is about challenging staid conventionalities when the boys choose to defy what is expected of them, particularly Neil when he choose to pursue acting against his father's wishes.
Despite his ventures into a multitude of different film genres over the course of his career, Weir's works have been described as never straying too far from "human drama" (IndieWire). Indeed, his many prominent films, among them Witness (1985) and The Truman Show (1998), feature actors well known for their comedy or action roles who instead take on serious, delicately emotional roles (e.g. Jim Carrey, Harrison Ford, Robin Williams). The films themselves explore the intricacies of humanity under stressful but relatable conditions, despite the perhaps far-removed premises. Dead Poets Society, taking place at a fictional private school in the 1950s and portraying adolescents laboring under strict tradition and a teacher with whom that tradition locks horns, represents an excellent example of this, of the human drama that fills Weir's style.
